- Address:
- Stonehenge: Salisbury Plain · Salisbury Cathedral: 6 The Close, Salisbury
- Contact:
- Stonehenge: 0370 333 1181 · english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/stonehenge · Tour bus: 0120 233 8420 · thestonehengetour.info · Salisbury Cathedral: 0172 255 5120 · salisburycathedral.org.uk
- Time required:
- 6 hours (including travel time to/from London), but make it 7 hours if you want to include Salisbury Cathedral
- Train stations:
- 1½ hour train journey from Waterloo (zone 1) to Salisbury (outside the zones), followed by a 35 min tour bus
It’s 6 o’clock in the morning and Waterloo station is practically deserted. There’s a few early risers and train station staff pottering around doing nothing… just adjusting stuff until their bones have woken up. Normally I would go upstairs for a cup of coffee but the darn place is still shut. All I can do is buy my train ticket and wait for the clock to drag its heavy hands round to the top.
A train ticket to Stonehenge will cost you the best part of fifty quid, and that doesn’t even get you the whole way. When you get off at Salisbury you’ll still have another nine miles on a tour bus. But more about that later – all you need to know at this point is that it is 6 o’clock in the morning and I am sitting here waiting for the day to start. Me and the cleaners. Me and the pigeons. Me and the moon.
The station has come to life now. The tannoys have crackled into action and workers are pouring off the trains and spilling out over the concourse. They have brought a lot of noise with them. I’ve only got ten minutes before the Exeter Central comes so I sip up, chuck my cup across the table and get going. It takes 1½ hours to get to Salisbury so it’s quite a lengthy ride. It’s definitely a day-trip, put it that way – and when you’re on a long train trip you have to be prepared to fight for a window seat. And I mean actually ‘fight’ (to the death, if necessary). There is nothing worse than having to stare at your shoes for two hours whilst the English countryside whizzes past the window out of sight.
I used to order my tickets online but I don’t bother anymore because the whole thing is a swizz. If you ask for a window seat then they always seem to stick you in the one where the window splits in two: with that big plastic spine running down the middle. My idea of a window seat is one that has actually got some glass in it – you know, that stuff that you can see through. So now I just take my chances and grab whatever I can – beating up a few old ladies and kicking a few kids if I have to. I don’t care. I am prepared to commit crimes to get a window seat. I don’t care about peace in the Middle East, the disappearing rain-forests or worldwide famine – just give me a decent window seat on the train.
It’s quite a pleasant scene outside the window: miles and miles of brown-brick suburbia changing into countryside, then vast reams of green with trees, hills beyond hills, more hills behind them, all rolling over the end of the earth as far as your eyes can see… decorated with a billowing ribbon of fast-moving clouds. If something’s not green, then it’ll be grey. That is my view of England today: green, grey and drizzling raindrops on the window. The perfect weather for Stonehenge: Stone Age weather.
I have arrived. It’s 8.45 AM and I’m sitting in Salisbury station. But Stonehenge is another nine miles away and there are no local buses. The only way of reaching the stones from here is to splash out another week’s wages on the Stonehenge Tour Bus. That is your only option. It’s either that or walk. Why couldn’t those lazy cavemen just have dragged the stones another nine miles closer to the train station? They’d already dragged them all the way from Wales, so I’m sure another nine miles wouldn’t have hurt.
The tour bus stops right outside the train station if you want to play it super-safe, but I think it’s much nicer to walk ten minutes into town and use their shop in New Canal Street (called ‘Salisbury Reds’). It’s quite a pretty little town once you get over the first bridge. Their buses depart every sixty minutes-or-so so you can stop for some breakfast, poke your nose into Salisbury Cathedral to have a quick look, and then catch a bus later.
The tour bus was a lot of fun – maybe the best part of the day. Their commentary points out all the old buildings as you drive through the town, then you head out into the countryside and very soon you are surrounded by green. I’m from London, remember, so the only shade of green I’ve seen is one that’s covered in mud. But this is through dips and hills and miles and miles of tree-coloured carpet. And all the time your eyes are continually scanning the horizon for your first sight of the stones.
The atmosphere was greatly improved today by the grey rain bashing against the windows of the bus. But then all of a sudden you arrive at the Visitor Centre, with no sign of the stones. Where are they? What they have done is very clever because they have located the Visitor Centre more than a mile from the monument, and totally out of sight behind a crest of trees. You then have to ride a little fleet of minibuses up the hill.
But before you do that it’s worth having a look around the little museum, where they’ve built a few Stone Age huts and explained how it was built, why it was built (they don’t know) and what it was used for (they don’t know that either).
The little minibus ride is the final stage of your journey, but if you want to drag it out even longer then you can opt to walk up the hill all by yourself. My head was willing, but my knees weren’t, so I took the bus. I thought the ride had quite a nice Jurassic Park-style feeling to it, trundling up the tree-lined path in a parade of little jeeps and I was half-expecting a big Brontosaurus to come bounding out of the bushes but instead I got… stones. I hate to say this, because I really wanted it to be fantastic, but my first good look at Stonehenge elicited a… huh, okay.
In my mind’s eye I was expecting them to be like the exposed bones of a mountain, but they were disappointingly average. (It takes a lot to impress me!) The largest one didn’t seem to be any higher than a house. But I admit that it’s difficult to judge their size when you can’t approach them close. You’re not allowed to walk amongst them anymore. What you have to do is pace around their perimeter on a roped-off bit of tarmac and grass, with about three million other people right beside you (which is a slight exaggeration, but not by much). You’re all bundled up together with your camera and your sandwiches, bumping each other’s elbows as you try and take some photos.
You’ve also got the distant rumble of lorries and coaches on the A303 right behind you. If they diverted that then the scene would be pristine: it would be a complete 360-degrees of green hills and trees as far as the eye can see. But instead it’s decorated with a distant string of power lines on the cusp of the hill, a conveyor belt of trucks and buses on the motorway behind, and a cacophony of camera-clicking tourists five feet from your face.
The most impressive thing that I saw all day was the angry sky. Imagine standing on top of that windy hill and seeing the sky all the way down to the joint. The clouds were as close as a coat and the wind and rain were whipping up the world’s worst watercolour: all gloomy blues and sheets of black and grey, with a bucket of dirty slop washed over the top.
It’s difficult to grade an attraction like this because… well, what does it do? Nothing. But I feel a bit guilty telling you not to bother because it’s the world famous Stonehenge. But this was my day: I spent over two hours getting there, another hour looking at some stones in the rain, and then another three hours getting home. If that’s worth seventy quid to you, then go for it.
If you want an even longer day then combine your visit with another prehistoric site nearby: Old Sarum
The author Craig Cross owns city-guide.london and has spent the last decade reviewing the capital’s landmarks, attractions and hotels. His guidebook London Squire is available from Amazon
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